My short story "A Field Guide to Ugly Places" is published today in Strange Horizons.

Scarcely twenty feet in front of him, a dozen kingfishers skimmed low over the chemical-streaked water in the culvert. He'd never seen even one kingfisher before; now there were a full dozen. If his heart hadn't been broken, Jamie reckoned he might have been amazed.

You can read it here.

It's also got a really neat illustration by Liz Clarke.

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An awful lot has happened since my last journal entry, although not much of it to me. I've been neglecting writing, journaling, reviewing and pretty much everything else except working. Steph, however, has had a much more successful time of it. For those of you who don't read her blog, over the last couple of weeks, she has got an agent, been to Wiscon and had a great time, and got a job.

I'm kind of envious of all that energy!

I've been faffing around with odd bits of story ideas for weeks, writing bits and then letting them fall. In some ways, I think that's been good for me. It's been a kind of recharging of my creative reserves after I'd written out most of my good ideas. Now there are all sorts sitting there either to be used or to be forgotten, and I've convinced myself I can come up with ideas again.

Yesterday I wrote a first chapter for a new novel. My normal procedure is to let the chapter sit for a period--weeks, probably--until it's sunk in and become a foundation that I can build a story on, and I expect I'll do that with this one too. In the meantime, the idea can compost in my mind for a while.

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With Steph due to start her new job at the beginning of July, we've suddenly realised it's not going to be so easy to have a holiday this year. We hadn't planned anything specific, figuring we had all summer, but I doubt Steph's new employers will be willing to give her a couple of weeks off right at the beginning of the job, particularly as she's going to tell them that she's already made plans for the time around Worldcon.

Oh, yeah. And the car's dying. The clutch is giving out and it's going to be expensive to repair. When we didn't have a car, everything was fine, but now we've got one, doing without one again seems like a tragedy. It's not like we drive very much, no more than a couple of hundred miles a month at most. But it took us on holidays. With a dog, it's tough to travel any other way.